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Author and Blogger Andie Mitchell Offers "It Was Me All Along: A Memoir" (Encore presentation.)

Aired on Monday, May 11th.

(Please note: This interview first aired back in February.) On this installment of ST, we speak by phone with the author and food-and-health blogger Andie Mitchell about her widely praised new autobiography, "It Was Me All Along." In naming this title a "Best Book of the Month" for January 2015, one critic at Amazon.com gushed: "Andie Mitchell is irresistible. And by that I mean she's irresistible no matter whether she weighs 268 (at the start of this delightful memoir) or 133 (by its end). She's so funny, so bouncy, so full of wit and energy and kindness (even or especially to the parents who contributed, in various ways, to her obsession with food) that even readers who would never think they'd read a 'weight-loss memoir' would be charmed by this one. How's this for an opening line: 'If you were not able to attend my twentieth birthday party, you missed a fabulous cake.... And if, by chance, you were able to attend my twentieth birthday party, you, too, missed a fabulous cake.' See? Somebody else might have begun her mournful story of bingeing and dieting and other eating disorders with an admonition or a complaint: Mitchell starts it with a joke. (Some things, as a friend of mine once said, are too serious NOT to joke about.) She then goes on to tell us the whole sad-and-funny story: of a father who loved her but not, ultimately, as much as his alcohol, about a caterer-mother who taught, perhaps too well, the young Andie to bake, about the friends who stuck by her as she careened from mood to mood and weight to weight, of the boys who did, too (and a few who did not). There are a lot of anecdotes here, many of them poignant, but also, usually leavened with sly self-knowledge: 'I wish I remembered his face as precisely as I remember eating the muffins,' Mitchell writes about the eating binge she embarked upon learning that her father had died. Now a health and food blogger at canyoustayfordinner.com, Mitchell has become an inspiring thin person -- but to readers of this delightful memoir, she's also always going to be the girl with the big, fat heart."

Rich Fisher passed through KWGS about thirty years ago, and just never left. Today, he is the general manager of Public Radio Tulsa, and the host of KWGS’s public affairs program, StudioTulsa, which celebrated its twentieth anniversary in August 2012 . As host of StudioTulsa, Rich has conducted roughly four thousand long-form interviews with local, national, and international figures in the arts, humanities, sciences, and government. Very few interviews have gone smoothly. Despite this, he has been honored for his work by several organizations including the Governor's Arts Award for Media by the State Arts Council, a Harwelden Award from the Arts & Humanities Council of Tulsa, and was named one of the “99 Great Things About Oklahoma” in 2000 by Oklahoma Today magazine.
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